Tagline: A visually stunning, clever game… which is also overly complicated and of questionable purpose.

I was of two minds over reviewing Video Fighter. It is a product which is long out of print – dating back five years to a time when Dream Pod 9 was still just a design studio at Ianus Publications. On the other hand I did just pick it up (new) yesterday, so I have firsthand experience that it’s still sitting on game shelves in some places.

But what really sealed this review’s existence was when I got an e-mail today accusing me of being (and I quote) “a corporate shill” for Dream Pod 9 because of my recent reviews laced with superlatives for the Heavy Gear game. You see, I was honestly disappointed with this product, despite its many positive qualities. The e-mail, combined with the fact that I had previously jested that I was on a “quest” of sorts to find a bad Dream Pod 9 product (see my review of the Heavy Gear Character Compendium), meant that I felt this review had to be done.

Video Fighter 1: Dragons of Fury is the second Card Fighter game (the first was Heavy Gear Fighter, based on the same basic system concepts and also defunct). It attempts to simulate video games like Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. As Jean Carrieres describes in his introduction to the 32 page instruction book, it was designed by people with a fix for these types of games… who also happen to get their chronometers cleaned at the local arcades by young kids willing and capable of “spending their last quarter” squeaking out every possible method of annihilating the competition.

Which is, of course, the first problem with this game. It’s a card game attempting to model a video game. It doesn’t try to be a fighter card game. It doesn’t take characters from your favorite video game and do something else with them. It doesn’t try to be abstract, nor does it attempt to model reality. Instead it attempts to model the gameplay of a video game.

Maybe I’m off base here, but what’s the point? I could see creating a card game which is similar to a typical video fighter game – you’d have one-on-one fights, flamboyant characters, etc. But the mechanics would be a model of actual fights. In the case of Video Fighter, on the other hand, you have a card game modeling video games which, in turn, model actual fights. It’s weird.

About the only possible utility a game like this would have is that it would allow you to play these games with a greater reliance on the strategy of combining various moves, rather than having your plans ruined because the other guy can punch buttons faster than you.

I guess if you’re into that type of thing. I, personally, think that this is about as worthwhile as a Monopoly: The Roleplaying Game which attempted to model the mechanics of the boardgame in a format which would allow you to explore the character potentials of being a shoe.

Basically if I wanted to pay a video fighter game I’d turn on the N64 or the Sony Playstation.

Back to Video Fighter. It comes packaged in a video amray (the plastic cases that rental places put the tapes in) with a beautifully illustrated insert. Inside is the aforementioned 32 page rulebook, eight fighter character cards, 108 playing cards, a reference sheet, and counters. The fine print on the back claims that these are all in “full color”, but the rulebook isn’t. Everything is beautifully illustrated by Ghislain Barbe (Dream Pod 9 is so lucky to have him).

This is a really beautiful game. Really fantastic.

Basically the game works like this:

1. All the players pick one of the fighter character cards. Each card has a name and is rated for his hits, action points, stun points, and toughness (for high, torso, and low attacks). Each character also has a selection of “moves” which they can perform.

2. Each player gets a hand of 10 action cards.

3. Play is broken into turns.

4. Whoever has the most action points is the Attacker and the other person is the Defender. So at the beginning of the turn the person with the most action points goes first and continues taking actions until his action point total has become lower than the other player’s, at which point he becomes the Attacker.

5. Attacks are initiated by playing an action card. The attack action cards each an action point cost, damage done, stun, a color, and also a symbol which identifies it as a specific type of attack (such as a punch or a kick). Okay? Now you need to match the symbol and the color to one of the moves printed on your character card. The moves will, themselves, modify the action point cost, damage done, and stun of the action card. There are also tricks which can be played with each move. The colors also determine whether the attack is aiming high, at the torso, or low.

6. You can defend against an attack by playing a blue card. Defense action cards block against either high, torso, low, or all attacks – obviously your defense card has to defend against the appropriate location from which the attack is originating.

7. If an attack hits, you subtract the toughness (from the appropriate location) from the damage done. If you lose all your hits you lose. If you lose all your stun points you can’t take any more actions for the rest of the turn.

8. A turn ends when all of the action points for both characters have been expended. New cards are dealt to bring each hand back up to 10 cards and play continues until someone is defeated.

Phew. That gameplay, in my opinion, is about as complicated as I want to get. Unfortunately there’s far more to this game. There are Trumps. The Tricks take up an entire section of the rulebook by themselves. The possible combinations between moves and action cards and defense options (only one of the many defense options is listed above) are dizzying. Then there are the optional range rules. Heck, there are even exceptions and clarifications to the initiative rules. Plus the rulebook, defying Dream Pod 9’s subsequent record, isn’t organized effectively. Nor are the concepts clearly explained.

Argh!

This is one of those games, I realized, that you get together with a group of your friends and spend about six hours playing (with the rulebook always close at hand) until you’ve finally gotten a fairly firm grasp of the rules… and then you never play it again because by the next morning you’ve forgotten how to play the damn thing and who wants to go through the hassle of learning it again?

Here’s the catch though: It’s fun. I found the gameplay to be fairly snappy once we finally got over the steep learning curve; the initiative system was fun and very effective; even the strategies you could build once you began to get a feel for the various combinations of moves and cards were interesting.

Okay, the sum up: It’s fun. It’s also more complicated than it needs to be (my friends and I both agreed that if we ever play it again we’ll cut a lot of the needless complication and write up a cheat sheet to help us get over the poor quality of the instruction manual). Plus my friends and I still think that the general purpose of this game (to model video fighter games) is questionable – quite a bit of the excess baggage we plan to trim comes in the form of rules attempting to get the card game to behave more like its video equivalents.

Personally I’d suggest picking up Heavy Gear Fighter over this game. It has similar mechanics, but doesn’t share all of the same flaws.

So there you have it: Dream Pod 9 was capable of producing a product I was less than happy with. Of course, it was five years ago. And it’s still visually pretty cool. And the gameplay is quite good once you get through the complicated learning curve. Sure, it’s still above average. Sure, you’ll probably still find me pulling it out from time to time to play. It just wasn’t up to the Pod’s normal quality level. I’ll still be buying their stuff sight unseen – assured of their quality before the book ever leaves the shelf.

(Okay, so maybe this won’t entirely satisfy that anonymous e-mail writer. Tough.)

[ Video Fighter 1: Dragons of Fury was originally, as the numeral in the title might suggest, supposed to be the first in a series of Video Fighter products. This was called the “Wolf” deck (Wolf being one the characters in the game), with decks specialized to the other characters coming later. These sequels never appeared and Dream Pod 9 has now abandoned both Video Fighter and the entire Card Fighter line. ]

Style: 5
Substance: 3

Author: Jean “Mr. Chun Li” Carrieres with Alexandre Racine
Company/Publisher: Dream Pod 9
Cost: $29.95
ISBN: 2-921-573-20-2

Originally Posted: 1999/05/28

I knew the word “amray” because I was working at Hollywood Video when I wrote this review. As the defunct nature of that particular business might suggest — along with the references to the N64 and Sony Playstation-sans-numeral — it’s been a long, long time since I wrote these things. Since then I’ve found quite a few Dream Pod 9 products I’ve been unhappy with, but my opinion of Video Fighter hasn’t changed: It spends too much time aping one medium within the constrictions of another. Shortly after this, Cheapass Games would release the superb Brawl card game which similarly approached the “fighter” genre. But whereas Video Fighter spent its time trying to model a video game, James Ernest’s Brawl instead captured the furious intensity of a fighting game using mechanics which are uniquely suited for the tabletop.

If you ever want to be a game designer, I recommend comparing Video Fighter and Brawl side-by-side until you fully, completely, and utterly grok the difference.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

In my review of the Magic the Gathering Official Encyclopedia yesterday I mentioned how Magic cards can be used to great effect as a quick source of inspiration. Here are a couple quick examples of this from my own campaigns.

ARBORETUM GROTTO

“Clay Golem” – Magic the Gathering: Fourth Edition

• A thick, tiered cleft. Magical lights clinging to the ceiling seem to cast daylight down onto the thick pleats of overgrowth choking the miniature, underground veil.
• SPINDERS: 8 spinders roam through the overgrowth. (These can be found in the Book of Fiends, one of the best bestiaries ever produced.)
• STATUE OF LIGHT: In the middle of the grotto sits a squat statue of clay clasping a bowl which seems lit from within. (See visual handout, above.)
  • LIQUID LIGHT: The bowl is filled with liquid light. Anyone touching the liquid will cause it to flow up over their hand (or hands). From that point forward, their hands will permanently glow white — producing the effects of a daylight spell.
• ALCHEMY (DC 25): Recognize that most of the plants growing here are actually valuable alchemical ingredients. 6 hours harvesting could yield 5,000 gp of raw ingredients.

THE GLASSWORKS

“Urza’s Power Plant” – Magic the Gathering: Antiquities

• A twisted morass of glass piping filled with flowing fire.
• THE ARTIFURNACE: Near the center of the twist labyrinth of glass is the Artifurnace. Eight large valves run around its circumference . (See visual handout, above.)
  • CRACKING THE ARTIFURNACE: If all eight valves are released, the Artifurnace can be opened.
  • HELM OF FIRE ELEMENTAL CONTROL: Suspended within the Artifurance is a helm of fire elemental control (crafted from brass and gold). But it doesn’t work: One wearing the helm can summon a Large fire elemental, but anyone wearing the helm will instantly provoke rage from any fire elemental.
• FIRE ELEMENTALS: If any of the glass tubing is broken or the valves of the Artifurnace opened, the fire elementals trapped within the tubing will break free in a rage.
  • 1 Huge Fire Elemental, 2 Large Fire Elementals, 16 Small Fire Elementals
• DM BACKGROUND: The idea was to create a magical item through entirely sympathetic rituals (by controlling the fire elementals physically, imbue an item with the ability to control them). Instead, the item became imbued with the rage of the imprisoned elementals.

Tagline: A valuable resource for serious Magic players or those of us who just like the art.

Let me start by explaining why I own this book.

I first encountered the phenomenon which is known as Magic the Gathering later than many of the other diehards in this industry. It was late 1993 when I first heard about the game and bought my first starter decks. I had missed the wonderful financial investment those early Alpha and Beta decks would have been (we had already entered the Unlimited Edition, which wasn’t). I had even missed the first expansion deck, Arabian Nights. Thus it was that I had my first exposure to the feeding frenzy of collectorism with the arrival of the second expansion deck, Antiquities.

It is important, I think, to remind people that this was back when the industry had lost its mind over these cards. Wizards of the Coast had proven themselves incompetent at printing to the actual demand (whether intentionally or not) and so stores were routinely ordering far more copies than they actually thought they could possibly sell (which would eventually bite everybody in the ass when Fallen Empires finally did manage to print themselves to fill all the orders from distributors). This was back when people when people were putting themselves on reserve lists for dozens of cases of cards.

Now, I liked Magic, too. Not so much for the gameplay (although it was very original and intriguing) or for the potential of deckbuilding (which didn’t appeal to me at all), but because I thought the cards were really cool. I found it interesting to look at the strange creatures and locations and spells described by these cards and have my imagination stirred by these brief glimpses and descriptions.

I did a little mathematical analysis and discovered that to get a complete set of Antiquities cards it would require the purchase of a single case. (Actually I took a random guess.) So I laid out the $70 necessary to buy the case (gah!) and, after tearing open dozens upon dozens of booster packs, finally put together my “complete set”.

And then I decided it just wasn’t worth it. I still liked the cards, I still liked the art, I still liked these little windows into the world of Dominia. I just couldn’t afford to drop $70 every couple of months (or $140+ considering that the next expansion set, IIRC, had twice as many cards). I’d rather buy, say, half a dozen roleplaying manuals with that money. Or twenty-eight paperback books.

Since that time I’ve always wished that Wizards of the Coast would publish the cards in some non-collectible, non-playable form which would let me collect the cards without going bankrupt at the same time. The Collector’s Editions they released a couple years ago were close, but ironically they were priced higher than they should have been (because they were a “special edition”), so they were still too expensive for my tastes.

Now we fast-forward five years to about six months ago when I first spotted the Official Encyclopedia on the shelf. Flipping through it I saw they had finally produced what I wanted. All of the cards produced up until 7/96 are reproduced at slightly smaller than original size, along with version notes, and some analytical text.

The book also includes a forward by Richard Garfield, an historical look at Magic, errata for the cards, misprints and oddities, promotional cards, an index for deckbuilder’s, and an index for the entire book.

So I own it because its really nice having all these cards gathered together at an affordable price. It would have been nice if the artwork had been reproduced at full size, but I won’t be too picky on that point.

It is also an interesting (if brief read) for it’s non-fiction coverage of the history of Magic.

Finally, it has a set of useful tools for deckbuilders (“professional” or otherwise).

All around this is a very nice book which fulfills a number of different roles for a number of different people. I hope it gets an update in a few years to make it more current.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Editors of Duelist
Company/Publisher: Carlton Books
Cost: n/a
Page count: 225
ISBN: 1-85868-240-1

Originally Posted: 1999/05/28

In the years since I reviewed it, this encyclopedia has, in fact, been expanded with a half dozen additional volumes and at least one new edition listing more than 7,200 cards. In recent years, of course, the internet has rendered efforts like this utterly obsolete: A quick Google search will turn up multiple sites indexing every MtG card in existence. Back in 1999, I would have salivated at the thought of it. (And, in fact, I probably did.)

I think this review also provides an excellent example of how a reviewer can bring a peculiarly idiosyncratic point of view to their treatment of a product: Most people picking up this encyclopedia would have probably been using it for deckbuilding, not lore-delving. But this is why the reviewer’s first duty to their audience is to clearly communicate their point of view while also supplying enough information about the product that those with different view points can (hopefully) intuit what their own opinions of the product might be.

MtG cards remain a wonderful goldmine of creativity that can easily be stripmined for your next D&D adventure. I’ve done it at least a half dozen times and I’ll almost certainly do it again. (As inspiration goes, it’s hard to beat a dollop of evocative text combined with lavish illustration.)

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

I’ve been saying for years that the RPG market has been suffering because it no longer has a gateway product: An affordable, complete product that looks like a game, doesn’t require a lot of invested time to play, is available in mainstream markets, and isn’t a paid preview for a different product.

A couple years ago, this prompted me to say that the D&D product line needed to feature “a single, consistent box that says ‘DUNGEONS & DRAGONS’ on the front cover.” (See the rest of my imaginary D&D Core Sets here.)

And earlier this month Mike Mearls wrote, “This brings us to the second big picture goal [for D&D Next]. We’re going to make an RPG product called Dungeons & Dragons. It will be the game, Dungeons & Dragons, not just a sampler or a game that guides you through making a character and playing a single adventure. You can buy D&D and play a full, tabletop RPG campaign. You will be able to start playing, regardless of experience, and will easily find other products to migrate to if you so desire.” (And it sounds like the “migrate” thing will be the result of other products offering modular additions, although we’ll have to wait and see.)

Holy shit.

Meanwhile, the ICv2 RPG bestseller lists for more than a year have consistently included Dragon Age as one of the Top 5 RPGs. (Summer 2012, Spring 2012, Q4 2011, Summer 2011, Q2 2011, Q1 2011) Although these Dragon Age players don’t seem to be present on traditional RPG forums, the game is clearly a quiet and persistent hit. (Which perhaps suggests, if we wanted to get really, really speculative, that the people buying Dragon Age aren’t traditional RPG fans.)

I mention this because Wil Wheaton just quietly announced that Dragon Age is going to feature in the two-part season finale of his Tabletop web-series. And according to multiple, reliable reports any game featured on Tabletop enjoys a huge boom in sales.

And Dragon Age already features the type of introductory product I’ve been arguing for and D&D appears to be returning to.

Meanwhile, hobby games in general have been enjoying three years of explosive growth. Board and card games have been leading that growth with RPGs only making up a small part of it, but it suggests that the market for games played face-to-face and around the table is ripe and ready.

So call me crazy if you’d like, but stitching all of this together I’m going to make a bold prediction: Over the next 12-24 months, RPGs are going to experience a boom in sales. And this boom has the potential to enjoy a critical chain reaction if the release of D&D Next is handled perfectly and if auxiliary factors like the Pathfinder MMO are successful at the right time and in the right way.

Microscope is a fractal storytelling game by Ben Robbins which allows you and your friends to collaboratively create vast, fictional histories: The rise and fall of galactic empires; the vast sweep of barbarian hordes; the byzantine rule of magical emperors.

The core of the game focuses on the creation of Periods, Events, and Scenes: Periods describe large swaths of time. Events are specific things that happen within each Period. And Scenes are designed to answer specific questions about particular Events.

This isn’t a review, so I’m not going to go into a great amount of detail. But what makes the game work is that it mechanically disrupts both planning (thus forcing you to improvise) and creative ownership (so that players don’t split up and all work in their own private turfs). I highly recommend it.

What I’m presenting here today is the “log” from the first session of Microscope I ever played, back from when the game was still in playtest. (As a tip: I would recommend not including ubiquitous time travel in your first game of Microscope. It was fun, but it also broke our brains.)

THE TIME PORTALS OF MARS

TIME PORTALS OPEN ON MARS

• Titanic Machines emerge from the Portals and begin killing off native fauna.
• The Qzelti, a group of native martians, evade machines and travel through Time Portals to Earth.

THE CLOSING OF THE TIME PORTALS WAR

• Creation of a coalition between native and immigrant populations to study the portals.
• Defector from Qzelti discloses to Martian scientist that the only way to close time portals is through suicide attack.
• Time portals destroyed through kamikaze strikes.

ERA OF CRYSTALLINE CITY-STATES

• Time echo kamikaze ghost utters technomantic prophecies of crystalline machines
• Titanic Machines construct the crystalline cities.
• In search of immortality, the native martian population integrate biological life with Titanic Machines.
• Anti-immortalists in native martian population, after proests of creation of bitanicals fail, head underground to start new civilization in ancient underground cities.
• Schizoid meme plague strands early bitanicals in narcissistic virtual worlds born out of self-destructive mental dominance wars. Rusting hulks litter the Dust Seas where they migrate aimlessly.
• Kamikaze Cult, in a martiatarian effort, genetically engineer dinosaurs as cheap slave labor.
• The kamikaze’s dinosaur slaves stage global riot, shaking all crystalline cities to the ground.

AGE OF THE DINOSAUR EMPIRE UNDER THE GOD-KINGS

• Martian-machine bitanicals become sentient and the new dinosaur populist lords begin to worship them.
• Kamikaze cultists declared anathema by Ulric I, founder of the Dinosaur Empire.
• Lone bitanical rescues last Qzelti from Dinosaur prisons and they retreat to caverns in the Deep South.

ERA OF UNDERGROUND CITIES (THE PRESERVING WARMTH)

• Dinosaur scholars discover time portal research notes 5,000 feet underground.

RENAISSANCE OF TIME PORTAL TECHNOLOGY

• Scientists discover time portals have created run-away planetary cooling.
• Anti-Global Cooling Fanatics invent Titanic Machines and send them to assassinate time portal scientists.
• Fringe scientists discover proof that ancient Kamikaze strikers did, in fact, survive the destruction of time portals.
• Dr. Kimchee is surprised to discover a time ghost of his favorite guinea pig appear in his lab after sending him through a time portal!
• Bitanical assistance to Dr. Kimchee infuses time portal with decelerated muon gel causing time rifts to rupture, sending all underground cities to the distant past.
• Kamikaze anathemists emerge from Shard Sea (remnants of crystal cities) leading the temporally tri-furcated army of cloned time ghosts to heal temporal rifts.
• Resusciated bitanicals mindwipe remaining dinosaurs of the empire and throw them through time portals to ancient Earth.

REMAINS OF EMPIRE ESCAPE FREEZING PLANET